Personal Discovery
by reminiscent-afterthought
Summary: I thought it was an impossible question, but it turned out to have an easy answer I just didn't want to face. Because, thinking I wasn't myself, wasn't Kobayashi Makoto, meant I hurt people close to me. But it also meant this time of mine wasn't wasted. /mentions of a past canon suicide attempt.


**A/N: **Written for the Snakes and Ladders in Writing-Land Challenge at the AMF, first square: a random quote (which is below :D).

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_ "Personal discovery is something intimates just don't ask of one another. If a person could hide their deepest secrets from themselves, how can they be trusted to pass along rumors?"_  
- Bauvard, The Prince Of Plungers

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**Personal Discovery**

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_You're asking me to understand who I am._

He walks ahead of me, like he always does, hands in pockets and looking ridiculous in his grey blazer and too high shorts – but hey, who was I to talk? Look at me after all. I'm a soul who sinned and who got another chance at life, but is wasting it.

'You're wasting time,' he says, turning around and starting to walk backwards, looking even more ridiculous. 'Your homestay's not going to last forever, you know.'

'Can't you tell me anything at all.'

He skips ahead. 'Nope; you have to do that yourself.'

_But I still don't know what to do._

'How long do I have?' I asked, aloud.

'Hmm…' He spun around again, skipping further and further ahead, like the fragments of dreams walking out of reach. Some part of me wants to chase after, to hold him and beg for answers – but what truth I do know holds me back. I'm here because I'm a sinner.

_And do I even want to remember my sin?_

'You're going about it all wrong, you know.' Pura-Pura – a guardian angel unlike my precognition of such angels – turned again. He spun round and round, moreso than any human could manage without losing balance. But it was all to prove he wasn't human at all…if he ever was.

But then, this whole story is about me and Kobayashi Makoto, so I suppose what Pura-Pura is doesn't wind up being relevant. He never answers a question about himself straight anyway. That was one of the first questions I'd had.

_Who are you? An angel..?_

I still wonder.

_Are you an angel?_

Of course, he won't answer. Nor will he grow wings and become white, aglow and clad only in a clean white gown with yellow trinkets on his tender wrists and ankles. But those are the images of angels in picture books or on paintings in walls.

I haven't tried to draw since waking up in this new and temporary body of mine. I wonder how this new body of mine will interpret the image of an angel in my heart.

I wonder…if I can even draw the images in my heart, since I'm not Makoto.

'You're overthinking the situation.' Pura-Pura has stopped spinning dizzily…for now. 'You should just try and be happy.'

_Be happy… I guess so…_

Do I need to understand myself for that?

**.**

I was mistaken. Or, else, I was right all along. I couldn't find happiness until I found a few things about myself, understood a few things. Like gelling up my hair and trying to look and act cool wasn't me after all; it just made me superficial and a target for abuse.

I tried that anyway, until I was bruised and bloody and stuck at home again…with a woman who was the mother of this body and I couldn't help but spite, despite how that tortured face made me feel inside.

_It's not me. _That was so easy to say. _It's not my mother. _And she isn't. I don't remember my previous life, but she cannot be my mother because she is Makoto's mother.

_Makoto's mother who's been nothing short of kind to me, who is not her son_.

But, somehow, the thought of her dance instructor in a love hotel, while her husband worked his modest job as a salaryman, made my stomach churn. It was something I didn't want to let go of, wanted to hold on to because it made me feel powerful in the powerless situation I was otherwise in. Even if I did feel guilty whenever I saw her expression fall, whenever I saw the shadows under her eyes, the way she looked at me afterwards and seemed to try extra hard to be nice…

She wasn't even my mother, so I should have been able to let that matter go. I just couldn't though. She was part of the reason Makoto died. Part of the reason I was here.

_But I'm just making excuses._

Because Hiroka was part of the reason as well, and I try my best to like her. After all, Makoto liked her. She was his very first crush, the crush that had crumbled when he saw her walk into that very same afternoon he saw the true face of his mother. And I do like her, though I don't think like Makoto did. Hiroka is funny, light-hearted, someone I can pretend quite easily to smile with – but that's the problem. It's all a game of pretend. Her smiles. My smiles with her. The words we exchange in the art club as I sit in front of Makoto's painting, just the way it had been since before his suicide.

I'm supposed to paint on, finish that piece of work. Initially I was afraid of ruining now. Now…

_It makes me feel calm somehow, looking at it._

'How strange,' Hiroka laughed when I told her this. 'And it's something you painted, too.'

_Hiroka and I don't understand each other._

But what did that matter? I didn't understand me, after all. How could I expect someone else to? The mother who tried so hard to make up for something in the past, something that I held over her head even if it had nothing to do with me. Even Pura-Pura thinks I'm being cruel about it. I know I am too. But I want to keep on holding on to it. Even though it doesn't tell me a thing about who I am. Or what makes me happy.

**.**

It's ironic that Shoko, who Makoto never looked at enough to remember, can see right through me, and knows I'm not Makoto. But she's annoying. I don't know why, but the moment I first saw her, she annoyed me. The way she looked right at me, _through_ me – but she told me what Makoto was like.

What she described seemed to me the sort of person who could never exist. Something more like an angel than Pura-Pura could ever hope to appear.

But Makoto was some poor soul who had killed himself and Pura-Pura was my guide in this world that was still strange to me.

_I don't want to be a stranger anymore._

It was tiring, feeling like I don't belong anywhere…except maybe the art club. But even that had its problems. Shoko was there, with her uncomfortable stare. Hiroka was there, with that superficiality that reminded me all too fiercely of the secret she had shared. Makoto's incomplete painting was there, with the black horse drowning under a small surface light – but there was nothing in that light worth reaching for.

_Is that how Makoto had felt? That there was nothing worth living for? Nothing worth salvaging from his life?_

Probably. He must have felt pretty rotten to try what he did, I guess. And now I'm here, with the chance to salvage that poor life of his, and in the process find myself.

_I'm not making much progress with that though_.

Honestly, every day seemed to be more miserable than the last. When I tried to have fun, it backfired on me. Either something bitter came along, I quickly grew bored, or it was snatched painfully away. I realised I couldn't make myself happy by changing the way I looked either: making myself taller, changing my hairstyle and breaking out of the short, quiet body that was Makoto.

Maybe that means I was a quiet person even in my previous life. Maybe the way I felt at peace only when I was alone in front of Makoto's drawings and paintings of sceneries and abstract things means I've always been a lonely person. Maybe the way that last unfinished painting, the one with the drowning horse, makes me feel calm, means that it's a true reflection of that heart of mine inside.

_Maybe I'm a lonely fool who committed suicide too._

And it was a depressing thought, even if it was a possibility that I was getting closer to those tasks set out for me: to understand myself, understand Makoto…and find my happiness.

**.**

Once I started getting to know people, I started understanding people as well. Those were all mistakes of mine, but slowly fixed. Becoming friends with Saotome-kun, being able to say "hi" to him in the classroom and walk home with him and talk to him about trivial things and look forward to seeing him the next day and sharing buns and drumsticks with him – all of them tiny, trivial things when my homestay would be over, whatever occurred by the end. If I failed my homestay, I would die again and Makoto's body will be left a hollow shell, a corpse to be mourned over, and that would be the end of it. If I passed, I'd get that old life of mine back, whatever it was, and Makoto would still vanish from the world.

_But I feel…happy, somehow._

Having a friend like Saotome-kun had made me happy. I wanted to spend more time with him. Do the trivial things friends did. Ride my bike with him all over town. Go to the beach in the summer. See the cherry blossoms in the spring. Chase each other home from school, stopping at every sweets shop on the way. Laughing together doing lunch, trading stories and food and all other things aside. I wanted that sort of life. Enough to work for it, even if it seemed like a pointless thing, studying when my homestay would be over before I graduated from this school. It didn't matter if I brought my average up or not if I, or Makoto, never made it through the year.

But still, it was important enough for me to want to try. And it made me understand more things. What Shoko had been talking about – what I'd misunderstood. What Hiroka really felt, underneath that mask of pretences she always wore…and now that I do understand, I can pity that, because ultimately I want my life to be something beautiful as well…but I can't help but look at all that's ugly about it instead.

_All of us…we're such depressing people. Grey and black, looking for all those different colours underneath…_

But I know those colours are there. And maybe, maybe, I've found my own ones. Something I want to keep on doing. Enough to fight for this happiness I believe _is_ happiness, to say "this is what I want to do" with such heartfelt conviction, even if my family – no, Makoto's family, is doing what's best for me. For him.

And somewhere, in my mind, we've started coming closer together, Makoto and I.

_Is there even a me and him? Or are we the same?_

I think I'm more thankful now, for this chance.

**.**

_You set me a seemingly impossible task._

'You found it.' Pura-Pura spins around in his spot like he always does, but the spinning doesn't seem to make me dizzy anymore. Maybe because I know now, a great many more things than I'd known before.

Including the answer to the challenge he'd set for me at the beginning of my homestay. My sin; what it was.

_But you were right. It was surprisingly easy in the end. _

'My sin…I killed someone, didn't I?'

His smile widens, but be says nothing. Just waits for me to go on.

_Even those things I didn't really want to know…_

Because it had been so much easier when I thought of Makoto's family as not my own, as the two of us being separate people, separate lives. But we're not separate. I know now; we're the same. The same life. The same sin. The same existence.

'I killed myself.'

The smile widened. But it wasn't a sinister looking backdrop; instead, it was a smile of encouragement, and waiting…and even a little hope.

Maybe he was an angel after all, hoping for someone as hopeless as me.

And I saw the completion of the painting at that moment, that painting of the drowning horse…

_…and the angel obscured by the dark and drabbed in grew, extending a hand…_

'I'm the soul of Kobayashi Makoto who committed suicide.'


End file.
